How to use this page

Propose sessions you wish others to lead (it's a good idea to let them know ahead of time)

Indicate whether you plan to attend a session (helps with scheduling)

Please place new proposal at the bottom of this document

How to propose a session

Please provide:

session name (as a === subhead === )

session proposer (optional: name a desired session leader, can be yourself)

one sentence session summary

type of session: (e.g.: talk, panel, open discussion, etc.)

goals of session

additional speakers/panelists

From an idea to a breakout

Breakout preparation (also known as the 'mad scramble') takes place Wednesday 21 September at 09:15-10:00.

The sessions that will make it will be in the breakouts grid, as well as minutes and summaries

Proposed sessions

Paid Content CG (new)

Proposer: Andrew Betts

Summary: A CG could bring together publishers and content creators to provide use cases and discuss solutions to improve the web's support for paid content (paywalled news, video, games etc). This session will gauge interest in creating that forum, and discuss how it could be chartered and what value it could offer.

Type of session: A brief introduction from Andrew followed by open discussion

Goals: Find interested parties to kick off the CG, refine the group's scope, and make a list of potential participants

Privacy compliance in the EU using W3C Tracking Protection

constraint: This breakout needs to take place at 2pm
Dial-in info: +1-617-324-0000 or https://mit.webex.com/ Meeting number: 643 129 380

Session overview: We believe that the emerging EU privacy regulations may impact cookie handling and tracking. We also believe that the TPWG Candidate Recommendations have the potential to simplify compliance with these regulations.

The topics we want to address in this breakout are:

1. Learn how to implement the Tracking Protection recommendations.
2. Share implementation experiences and ask questions
3. Learn about and discuss (emerging) EU privacy regulations
2. Provide feedback on the draft recommendations
4. Discuss with us the future of the working group

Horizontal review summit

Proposer: Michael Cooper, Janina Sajka

Session overview: Gather the groups that conduct horizontal review to share challenges and techniques in making effective impact on specifications, and propose ways to improve horizontal review effectiveness. Horizontal review is structured review across specifications for issues that impact broad stakeholder groups. W3C currently conducts horizontal review for accessibility to people with disabilities, architectural principles, internationalization, privacy, and security. This session is primarily oriented at people who engage in horizontal review. People engaged in specification development who would like to learn how to engage with the process or suggest ways to improve the process are also welcome.

Session goals: Show what is done by the WoT IG to all the W3C Members and encourage people to collaborate with the group (and join the group :).

additional speakers/panelists: PlugFest participants

Web & Virtual Reality

Proposer: Anssi Kostiainen, Ningxin Hu, Frank Olivier

Session overview: open discussion on the current state and future direction of the Web & VR. WebVR API (GitHub) currently in incubation in the WebVR Community Group (Charter) provides access to Virtual Reality devices, such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard, in your browser. Beyond the WebVR API, there are further opportunities for the web platform to make use of and integrate with VR devices (360 video and images from HTML, VR as progressive enhancement, declarative 3D scenes and 3D scene graph APIs...)

Security Jam

The session will be dedicated to share the recent progress on security related topics in W3C, coevring at least web crypto and web authentication, and will discuss also tools for security reviews. In addition, participants are expected to share some security features

Advancing Web Platform Application Testing (HTML Testing)

Session overview: We'll present the current status of AWPAT CG and show demo

type of session: Presentation, Demo, and open discussion

Session goals: Show what is done by the AWPAT CG to all the W3C Members and encourage people to collaborate with the group (and join the group)

additional speakers/panelists

Make W3C Great Again

Proposer: Dom Hazael-Massieux

Session overview: Part of Dom's job will now include making W3C a better place for collaborative work; he thus wants to hear from both newbies and oldtimers what they think are both the greatest barriers but also the many little annoyances to working on specs, test suites and bringing ideas in W3C

type of session: open discussion

Session goals: Roadmap to making W3C great again

additional speakers/panelists

Future of Communications on the Web

scheduled at 3:30pm UTC+1 in 1.07 with remote participation via Webex

Proposer: Dom Hazael-Massieux

Session overview: The WebRTC 1.0 API has opened the road to make the Web a platform for audio & video communications on the Web; while this provides a great starting point, there are still many other aspects of a successful communication platform that the Web doesn't cover, for instance:

keeping connections up when browser is in background

integrating a presence mechanism

scalability improvements

device handover

audio priority management (e.g. phone vs webrtc comm)

This session aims at identifying these gaps and determining when and where they might be addressed, or how to continue the conversation about them.

Micro-payments - A new business model for a Web without Ads and tracking

Session overview: Brave browser has announced that they are incorporating micro-payments into their browser. The current state of Web payments requires that this system limit itself to using Bitcoin for this purpose. Using an open protocol like Interledger, browsers and content producers could make and accept payments using whatever method they desire without the need for user interaction to select a payment method.

In this session the Interledger Community Group will discuss the experiments it is doing to solve the micro-payments challenge and open up the discussion on prior efforts and what we can do differently this time.

Type of session: round table, brainstorming, un-talk (The Interledger CG meets the following day for a deeper dive).

Session goals: demonstrate work done to date in the Interledger CG (or any other group), gather ideas, discuss next steps.

Additional speakers/panelists: (Andrew Betts?)

Apps or Documents? Manifests, JSON, and the Future of Publications

Proposers: Dave Cramer and Tzviya Siegman

Summary: Complex documents, like applications, often consist of multiple web resources. But the Web doesn't have much to say about collections of resources. Web documents can link to each other, and link relations let you say a few things about what's on the other end of the link. But you can't easily say two documents are part of a larger entity or this metadata applies to a group of documents.

Type of session: open discussion

Goals of session: Discuss the role of Web App Manifest in apps and publications. Will JSON save us all? What about the future of books in browsers? We'll discuss PWP, BFF, EPUB, and other relevant acronyms.

Positive Work Environment Task Force

Proposers: Ann Bassetti and Amy van der Hiel

Summary: The W3C Positive Work Environment Task Force would like to get feedback from the W3C community on their concerns and suggestions and to explore our goals and ideals as a community. Discussions may include: revitalizing the TF; Chairs training; best practices; diversity and inclusion; and our aspirations for the kind of community W3C can be.

Type of session: open discussion

Goals of session: discussion, feedback and community building. We invite members of the community to join and be involved in the TF.

WebIDL Future Work

Proposer: Tobie Langel

Session overview: The WebIDL spec has just been converted to Bikeshed and gained a new editor in the process. This should increase the pace at which the spec moves. The goal of this session is to collect and understand what the community needs from WebIDL in order to help prioretize the (rather large) backlog of issues and define future work.

type of session: open discussion

Session goals: collect input and prioretize future work

additional speakers/panelists: Domenic Denicola, Anne van Kesteren

Announcing Apache Annotator (incubating)

Proposer: Benjamin Young (aka BigBlueHat)

Session overview: The Annotator.js community has decided to migrate its work to the Apache Software Foundation (the ASF) where it can continue it's growth within a carefully curated collaborative space that's both corporation and code creation compatible (clearly). The Web Annotation Working Group's specifications are core components to the planned future of the community's planned libraries, tools, and code. There's also untapped implementation opportunity within the ASF for W3C specifications in general and cross communication available via ASF commiters being involved within various Working Groups. It's a collaboration worth strengthening.

HTTPS Migration in Local Network

Summary: We are investigating how to apply valid TLS certificates to devices for HTTPS/WSS connection on local network. Web browser can access and control local network devices via HTTP and/or WebSocket; e.g. smart TV, set-top box, wi-fi enabled storage like Eyefi, car infotainment, etc. Such a device, however, cannot usually provide TLS connection without a self-signed certificate, and often faces security restrictions like Secure Context and Mixed Content.

Standards for Virtual Assistants

session proposer: Deborah Dahl

summary: In recent years, interaction with voice applications has become much more flexible, with a user-initiated dialog style and significantly fewer constraints on spoken input. Many of these new applications take the form of "virtual assistants". These include general-purpose assistants (for example, Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Alexa) as well as virtual assistants with specialized domain expertise. This session will discuss current and potential standards that will support these types of applications.

type of session: open discussion

goals of session: Get ideas for the Voice Interaction Community Group and encourage participation.

Fusing User Input and Sensor Data

session proposer: Deborah Dahl

summary: Web applications can include user input as well as sensor input. There are use cases where it is important to take into account the fusion of both these kinds of input. For example in a medical application the user could provide subjective opinions about their feelings as well as quantitative input from medical sensors. For example, a user might say "I feel light-headed" while a blood sugar sensor provides a blood sugar reading. A uniform representation for user input and sensor data would facilitate the integration of both types of information into a single medical report or diagnosis.

type of session: open discussion

goals of session: Collect use cases and discuss requirements for this topic.

Mobile Accessibility

session proposer: Kepeng Li

summary: We want to provide some issues and practices about mobile accessibility, and we can discuss gaps between these practices and existing specifications. After discussion, we can find out if anything is missing from existing specifications and we can provide further inputs to enhance existing spec or write new specs.

type of session: talks and open discussion

goals of session: Collect issues and practices about mobile accessibility, and discuss gaps and standard opportunities for this topic.

Music Notation Community Group Update

constraint: This breakout needs to take place some time after 2pm

Proposer: Joe Berkovitz (joe@noteflight.com) co-chair of the Music Notation Community Group [1].

Session overview: Present an overview of current activity in the Community Group, whose mission is to evolve a next generation markup language for Common Music Notation. The intent is to move this effort into a formal standards track in the future. A proposal for harmonizing music markup with other web standards such as CSS and DOM will be presented.

type of session: talks and open discussion

Session goals: Collect thoughts on how to apply concepts from work on other W3C standards to this goal.

Vocabulary development & management at W3C

The Rec Track process is designed to create ultra-stable specs that you can build software against. This is not always a good fit for the collaborative development and longer term maintenance of vocabularies. schema.org provides a stellar example of success in this regard: a Community Group allows discussion of new terms that are added to the primary namespace via a documented process. How can/should W3C support this kind of process? What kind of process is appropriate for other vocabularies to provide robust stability (this is W3C!) whilst also being responsive? Should Working Groups be able to add to namespaces defined by earlier work? More controversially perhaps, should Community Groups be able to do this? See Adding to W3C RDF Namespaces. What sort of tooling do we need? Hopw can it be paid for in the short term and maintained for the long term?

Type of session: quick intro from Amy and Phil, then discussion

Relevant to: Web of Things, Semantic Web and more.

Session goals: Recommendations for W3C action.

Verifiable Claims Working Group Proposal

It is currently difficult to transmit banking account information, proof of age, education qualifications, healthcare data, and other sorts of verified personal information via the Web. These sorts of data are often referred to as verifiable claims. The mission of the proposed Verifiable Claims Working Group is to make expressing, exchanging, and verifying claims easier and more secure on the Web. Recently, the Web Payments Interest Group put forward a proposal to W3C Management for the formation of a Verifiable Claims Working Group. We'll discuss that proposal in this group as well as invite people to participate in our first face-to-face meeting in Silicon Valley at the end of October 2016.

Type of session: Status report followed by discussion

Relevant to: Attestations, Credentials, Blockchain, "Identity"

Session goals: Educate W3C Members on current status and invite them to participate in the upcoming face-to-face meeting in Silicon Valley

Redecentralization and Social Web

The Social Web WG, ending in January, has four specs at Candidate Recommendation with several live implementations, and more Working Drafts in the pipeline, moving us toward a Web where people can connect and collaborate without being locked into single-vendor silos. Come see demos, and talk about what should happen next.

Subtitle format support of TextTrack and TextTrackCue interfaces

Summary: The TextTrack and TextTrackCue interfaces in HTML 5 are designed to be format independent. Different subtitle and caption formats should be able to make use of them (e.g. WebVTT and TTML). Despite the general HTML design, in practice most TextTrack and TextTrackCue implementations in Web Browsers expect only WebVTT as a subtitle and caption format. To improve interoperability between services that are provided on mobile, PC and connected TV there is a need to bridge a technology gap between the HTML 5 ecosystem and widely adopted subtitle and caption formats.

Accessibility Object Model

Proposers: James Craig (Apple) and Alice Boxhall (Google)

Summary: This effort aims to create a JavaScript API to allow developers to modify the accessibility tree for a web page.

Several browser vendors (Google, Apple, Mozilla, etc) have been working on a shared spec (intended for WICG) since January 2016. The spec proposes the Accessibility Object Model. We plan to split this work into four phases, which will respectively allow authors to:

modify the semantic properties of the accessibility node associated with a particular DOM node,

create virtual accessibility nodes which are not directly associated with a DOM node (e.g. OpenGL), and

programmatically explore the accessibility tree and access the computed properties of accessibility nodes.

To ensure a reasonable implementation scope, the phases are intended to be implemented serially, rather than concurrently. Later phases may change as use case or implementation needs require.
See explainer document: https://github.com/a11y-api/a11y-api/blob/master/explainer.md
We welcome feedback from members of the accessibility and web platform community.

How could W3C help global members to participate more effectively?

Session Proposers: Angel Li (W3C)

Summary: W3C team, together with the Web standard community, has been devoted to enhance global participation ever since the organization was created. Due to the organizational structure and limited resources, the efforts for such a purpose have been in a spontaneous way among the global team of W3C. With the new Global Participation Management Function created by the 2016 W3C Internal Reorganization, more organized and standard practices and processes should be designed to improve the engagement of the global Web community.

Goals: This effort aims to identify the challenges and blocks that prevent w3C members to participate in Web standards, to collect suggestions and best practices from members, and share the current plans about processes and practices to enhance global participation with members.

Type of session: open discussion

Incubation as the New Normal

Session Proposers: Chris Wilson (Google), Rick Byers (Google)

Summary: This session is intended to be an open discussion about incubation-first standards, and how the WICG can be used as a vehicle for responsible standardization.

Goals: Get the word out on incubation, refine ideas on what's going well/not so well with the WICG.

What is Education and Outreach Working Group?

Proposer: Eric Eggert

Summary: A brief introduction of what EOWG does, what our activities have been in the last year and how we structure our work going forward. Also there is some insight on how we help other Working Groups to promote their Web Accessibility efforts.

Type: Talk with open discussion

Goals: Introduce EOWG and our resources to a wider audience, explore further areas of collaboration with other Working Groups

Additional Speakers: Sharron Rush and Brent Bakken, EOWG Co-Chairs

Browser Process Isolation

Proposer: Mike West

Summary: User agents are working towards isolating sites into distinct processes for a variety of reasons (security, memory space, etc). It would be helpful to discuss strategies and heuristics for this separation, as well as related isolation proposals like https://mikewest.github.io/isolation/explainer.html

Type: Open discussion

Envisioning New Accessibility Guidelines

Proposer: Jeanne Spellman

Summary: The WCAG 2.0 was published in 2008. The web has changed. WCAG 2.1 is in process, but it is time to plan for a major revision. WCAG WG is planning user research and public input to improve the design and process for developing the new guidance.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) and the Web

Session overview: Discuss use cases, requirements, implementation status and plans for high dynamic range (of luminance) video, imaging and styling on the Web. We assume we already have, or will son get, high chroma (gamut volume) and high(er) bit depth.

Async Web (aka Parallel Web)

Proposer: Nolan Lawson (Microsoft)

Session overview: the problem occurs frequently on the web of third-party scripts, over which one often has no control, and for which one would like isolation without sacrificing performance. Web workers solve the isolation and the performance problem, but unfortunately are missing crucial APIs that would allow many naive third-party scripts to work out-of-the-box. So we've turned to iframes, with the result being that ad-heavy sites, or often just sites that want to act as a "platform" for third parties, end up with a large number of iframes that overload the UI thread. How can we solve this problem?

CANCELLED: Brainstorming: design & usability of W3C pages

Session overview: the look & feel of W3C pages and sub-sites is not consistent, and there are usability and a11y issues that we want to address. What are the biggest complaints that users have? How can we start unifying the design of pages without annoying their long-time users, and without causing confusion? What are the most cost-effective ways to modernise our design? Who among the membership or general audience want to help, and how?

CANCELLED: Web Spotlight -- the good, the bad, and the ugly

Summary: This session is intended to be an open discussion about where we are today in terms of standardization trends around decentralization -- what works, what doesn't work, as well as what is missing and still needs to be done. We hope to identify what are the pain points that hinder the decentralization of the Web, so that groups that work in this space can better collaborate with the people who participate in the standards-making process.

Goals: Discover how to better align the decentralization work done outside W3C with the current/in-progress standards at W3C, especially the ones dealing with identity, privacy, and authentication.